October 2011
10-16-11
"Schedules, schedules, schedules"
Mornings. 10-10-11 "Everything you ever need to know about farming" Early this summer, a young man drove into the driveway beside my house. He was well-dressed (perhaps a little too well-dressed) and drove a clean, new, expensive pick-up truck (also perhaps a little too clean and a little too new). 10-02-11 "Fires"
The dogs begin their insistant calls around 6:30. Because the cats are not finished eating, they have to remain inside their pens until 7.
They are not pleased. They insist. They plead. They clamor.
By 7am, I'm in the barnyard. This is the easy season. The dogs are freed from their confines and the chickens roused and, depending on their insistance, given a little cracked corn to start their day.
Then it's back to the house for my last sips of coffee, perhaps a moment or two before the fireplace, and off to the gardens.
Plowing, planting, weeding. Lather, rinse, repeat.
By late afternoon it's time to feed the animals.
The goats are coming on very pregnant now so their diets are limited. Too much feeding means babies that are too big. They eat all the grass and brows their little stomachs can manage but grain, the dessert of the ladies' choosing, is offered every third day only.
The cows are (mostly) content now but that won't last, the grass (or hay or grain) is always greener!
But times, they are a changing. Time will come when there is not enough light in the day, when babies must be birthed and fed and tended.
Time will come when the weather will no longer allow grass to grow and we will need to feed hay and extra feed, when we will wake up worrying about the cold.
Our schedules are constant and constant in their changing.
For now we take brief moments to pause and watch the seasons change, a new time is just ahead.
It was a hot day even by Georgia standards.
I'd been out planting tomatoes since 7am and the time was now approaching noon.
I was hot, I was tired and I was cranky.
We've become accustomed to "drop-by" "customers" (yes, that needs to be two words).
Please allow me to clarify:
"Drop-by" -- those people who were going to email ahead of time but just forgot. Also those people who just heard about the farm and wanted to "see what's going on."
Also those people who were just wondering if they could look around.
"Customer" -- people who might come back and buy something another time but for now just wanted to drop-by (see above definition).
Also those people who would be our greatest customers in the world as long as we're selling tomatoes (cheap please!), asparagus and farm eggs.
Forgive my cynicism.
However today's hero was none of those people.
No, the gentleman in my driveway this summer wanted something different, something more.
"Oh my gosh," he exclaimed, leaping from his truck in his perfectly pressed (and, forgive me, very pink) shirt, "are you really a farmer?"
I don't know if it was the dirt caked on both knees, the overalls I was wearing, or the farm sign and pasture full of goats that clued him in to this observation.
"Yes," was all that I managed.
"Wow, oh wow," he said again.
I glared.
"Can you..." he began, stopped, then started again, "I mean will you...." He took a deep breath. So did I.
"Can you teach me to be a farmer?" he finally managed to sputter, wringing his hands all the while.
I was not prepared for this guy.
Can I buy some produce?
Do you sell raw milk?
Can my five-year-old and fifty of his closest friends come out for a birthday party?
All of these questions I could manage.
"Can you teach me to be a farmer?" was beyond my realm of prepared answers.
"No," I said flatly and turned to leave.
"But..." he sputtered.
I was crushing him and I knew it.
"But I want to learn to live off of the land," he said.
This was getting worse by the minute. He was shaking, I feared that if I delayed he was going to fall at my feet, latch onto my leg and never let go.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"But..." he began again and then hung his head.
Yes, I know, I was a little hard on him, I know. I feel guilty even to this day.
I feel guilty about a lot of things, I blame my Grandmother and my mother, both of whom had the guilt of the best Irish Catholic without a trace of Irish or Catholicism in their bodies.
Junior left. In my mind he's still somewhere doing whatever job he was doing before that fateful day when he was possessed by a moment of sun-struck ambition to pull into my driveway.
In my mind, I've saved his soft hands and his perfect wardrobe from every facing the certain ruin of farming. I've done him a favor.
But I harbor guilt.
Perhaps Junior was going to be a great farmer, was going to leave behind the ivory tower, embrace the earth and become one of the greatest, most passionate farmers of all-time.
Perhaps.
This week a friend sent me a book called "Farm Anatomy."
Beside over 100 pages of really cute illustrations, are the basics of every farming task.
Here are overviews of all of the major breeds of sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, cows and horses.
Here are planting charts and insect identification guides, recipes and tips for cleaning your composting toilet. (Ok, I made that last part up, but you get the idea.)
It really is a very cool little book and I'm half tempted to tear out some of the pages and frame them for my kitchen walls.
But when it comes to following the illustrations for advice on how to fell a tree...perhaps not so much.
The truth is, at least in my always humble opinion, farming is one of the most diverse, hardest jobs on the planet.
On any given day, our tasks may range from giving vaccinations to cows to canning tomatoes to repairing the roof on a haybarn.
We are Jacks-of-all-trades in the truest since of the word.
we are also, as my dear friend Junior recognized, something of eclectic artists.
Gene Logsdon has called agriculture the "mother of all arts" and I suspect in some ways that he is correct.
There is order and beauty and creativity too in all things that we do.
For farmers, the universe is a perfectly ordered place in which all things, even floods, hail storms and catastrophes make sense on some very basic, very natural level.
Everything happens for a reason.
Which brings me to my point (and yes, I do have one). It seems to me that everything you need to know to be a farmer is the same as everything you need to know to be a humanist: all things are connected and work together towards an end.
To begin to see the causes and effects of the world, one piece to another, one small iota at a time, is to understand something larger than ourselves, is, in some way, to be a farmer.
Alright, I promise that's the last of my philosophizing for the month.
CSA harvesting beginning next week! The gardens are brimming with all varieties of greens and the rains of this weekend will only help their growth.
It's a good time of year to be a farmer, the air is cooler and cleaner and fresher.
This past week we baled hay, loading the barns with 350 square bales which should be enough to see us through the winter.
On a reasonably cool October day, we raked and baled and stored hay, preparing for the season ahead.
Connectedness. In all things.
It is with great joy (and only a mild amount of embarrassment) that I confess I have lit my first fire.
Cold? you ask.
Well...yes! I say emphatically.
Really?
Well...no, not cold exactly, but there is comfort and joy and peace to be found in a fire and this morning I am delighting in all three.
What about the chimney swifts? you ask.
Oh they're fine, just fine.
Weren't they in the flue just last evening, you ask, chattering away, perhaps as many as a dozen?
No, no, not last evening, I insist, I did wait for their departure just two days before. Besides, the little vagabonds were only mooching borrowed space, their chicks had long since fledged, learned to hunt, learned to come home at night and accept my gift of free lodging.
The swifts and I enjoy a happy exchange of company all summer long. I delight in their cheerful voices that rise and fall from the chimney well into the evening and first thing in the morning, and they take more than happy residence of my unused space, this year raising not one but two sets of chicks.
But seasons change, birds and goats and cows and all farm things grow up and move on before the cycle begins again.
Today, our weather is shifting, there is a chill in the air that causes the horses to throw up their heads and race around the pasture like fools.
The goats have found new energy and they spend much of their day off in the woods foraging the last of the autumn brows.
The cows are, as always, more content. They lumber from the field to the water troughs and back again. They have no calves to tend now, they are independent and as such return to their lives of leisure.
But the gardens have been replanted and crops spring from the ground every day, one day only a thin scattering of dust across the seed, the next day rows upon rows of tiny green sprouts. There is promise in their appearance, like the coming of a new year.
I suppose, in some ways, each season is a new year on the farm.
Today, as my fire pops and crackles with joy, and the dogs curl close in their beds to soak up its warmth, we have hopes and dreams and promises of all new things to come.